FEBRUARY 2017 « IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE 19

P E O P L E I N C O N T R O L «

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCS.2016.2621499

Date of publication: 19 January 2017

This IEEE Control Systems Magazine issue presents inter-

views with Bayu Jayawardhana, a tenured associate pro-

fessor at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and

the current chair of the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS)

Systems Biology Technical Committee (TC); Javad Lavaei, an

assistant professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering

and Operations Research at the University of California, Berke-

ley, and the 2016 winner of the American Automatic Control

Council Donald P. Eckman Award; Simona Onori, an assistant

professor at Clemson University and the chair of the CSS Auto-

motive Controls TC; and Andrew G. Alleyne, who is the Ralph

M. and Catherine V. Fisher Professor in the College of Engi-

neering at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign and

was one of the semiplenary speakers at the 2016 Conference

on Decision and Control.

Bayu Jayawardhana is a tenured associate professor at the

University of Groningen, The Netherlands. He received the

B.S. degree from the Institut Teknologi Bandung, Indonesia, in

2000, the M.Eng. degree from Nanyang Technological Univer-

sity, Singapore, in 2003, and the Ph.D. degree from Imperial

College London, United Kingdom, in 2006, all in electrical and

electronics engineering. He was with the Department of Math-

ematical Sciences, Bath University, United Kingdom, in 2006

and with Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre at the Univer-

sity of Manchester, United Kingdom, in 2007. He has been affili-

ated with the Engineering and Technology Institute Groningen,

Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, the University of

Groningen since 2008. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, a

subject editor of International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear

Control, an associate editor of European Journal of Control, a

member of the CSS Conference Editorial Board, and chair of

the CSS TC on Systems Biology. He has consulted or collabo-

rated with multinational companies including Philips, Photonis,

and Fokker. His research interests are in nonlinear systems

theory and its application to systems biology, mechatronics,

micronanotechnology, and smart manufacturing processes.

Javad Lavaei is an assistant professor in the Department

of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at the Uni-

versity of California, Berkeley. He was an assistant professor

in electrical engineering at Columbia University from 2012 to

2015. He received the Ph.D. degree in control and dynamical

systems from the California Institute of Technology under the

supervision of Prof. John C. Doyle and Prof. Richard Murray

in 2011 and was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University

working with Prof. Stephen Boyd and Prof. Abbas El Gamal for

one year. He received the Milton and Francis Clauser Doctoral

Prize for the best university-wide Ph.D. dissertation, “Large-

Scale Complex Systems: From Antenna Circuits to Power

Grids.” His research focuses on optimization theory, control

theory, and power systems. He has won several awards, includ-

ing the DARPA Young Faculty Award, the Office of Naval Re-

search Young Investigator Award, the National Science Foun-

dation (NSF) CAREER Award, the Resonate Award, the Google

Faculty Research Award, the Governor General of Canada Ac-

ademic Gold Medal, the Northeastern Association of Graduate

Schools Master’s Thesis Award, and a Silver Medal in the 1999

International Mathematical Olympiad. He is an associate editor

of IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid and serves on the confer-

ence editorial boards of the CSS and the European Control As-

sociation. His journal paper “Zero Duality Gap in Optimal Power

Flow Problem” received a prize paper award from the IEEE

Power Energy Society Power System Analysis Computing and

Economics Committee in 2015. He is a corecipient of the 2015

INFORMS Optimization Society Prize for Young Researchers

and the recipient of the 2016 Donald P. Eckman Award.

Simona Onori is an assistant professor at Clemson Uni-

versity. She received the laurea degree from the University of

Rome, “Tor Vergata,” in 2003, the M.S. degree from the Uni-

versity of New Mexico, Albuquerque, in 2005, and the Ph.D.

degree from the University of Rome, “Tor Vergata,” in 2007. She

began as a control engineer at Thales-Alenia Space in Rome.

Subsequently, she transitioned from a postdoctoral fellow, to

a lecturer, and then to a research scientist, all at the Center

for Automotive Research and Mechanical Engineering Depart-

ment at The Ohio State University. Simona joined the Clemson

University Automotive Engineering faculty in 2013, and she has

held a joint appointment with the Electrical and Computer Engi-

neering Department since 2014. She has held visiting research

professor positions at the University of Trento, Italy, in 2014,

and the University of Orleans, France, in 2016, and she was

an invited lecturer at the Beijing Institute of Technology, China,

in 2015. She is an IEEE Senior Member (2015), chair of the

IEEE CSS TC on Automotive Controls (for the term 2015–2018),

associate editor for the IEEE CSS Conference Editorial Board

20 IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE » FEBRUARY 2017

BAYu JAYAwARdhANAQ. How did your education and ear­ly career lead to your initial and con­tinuing interest in the control field?

Bayu: Throughout my education in electrical and electronics engineering

(with bachelor’s, master’s, and doctor-ate degrees), I have always opted for the systems and control specializa-tion. One of the main reasons is due to its proximity to mathematics dis-cipline, which is one of the fields of science that I have loved since I was young. During my senior year at the Institut Teknologi Bandung, we won the grand prize of the Texas Instru-ment Asia Digital Signal Processing Competition as well as being a final-ist for the Young Inventors Award or-ganized by Hewlett-Packard and Far Eastern Economic Review, where our team worked on the application of a dynamic neural network algorithm in an active noise-control system for a cabin car. Two of the five team mem-bers (myself and Hendra Nurdin, now a senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales) are still active members of the IEEE Control Systems Society. After my bachelor’s degree, I was very fortunate during my mas-ter’s and doctoral studies to be super-vised by two of the most influential figures in control, Prof. Xie Lihua, an

IEEE Fellow at Nanyang Technologi-cal University, and Prof. George Weiss, at Imperial College London, who have shared their enthusiasm on systems and control theory. All of these posi-tive experiences have compounded my determination to have an academ-ic career in systems and control.

Q. What are some of your research interests?

Bayu: In general, my research in-terests cover broad topics related to nonlinear systems theory and applica-tions. Let me present an overview of various research projects across dif-ferent disciplines that I have worked on for the past five years.

The first one is on the development of a cryogenic mechatronic system that will be one of the essential sys-tems inside a scientific instrument for the future European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). The instrument is called the mid-infrared E-ELT imager and spectrograph (METIS), and it will be the third instrument commissioned for E-ELT around the year 2026. The

(2015–present), vice-chair of the IFAC Technical Commit-

tee of Automotive Controls (2015–present), and an associate

editor of SAE International Journal of Alternative Powertrains

(2012–present). Since joining the Clemson faculty, her cur-

rent research has been funded by Fiat-Chrysler Automobile,

BorgWarner, Honda, Johnson Controls, and the NSF. She has

coauthored a book and two book chapters and has published

over 70 articles in archival journals and conference proceed-

ings. Her research interests range from the area of dynamic

systems to health monitoring, control and optimization for auto-

motive propulsion systems with a focus on e-mobility, emission

control, and waste-heat recovery.

Andrew G. Alleyne is the Ralph M. and Catherine V. Fisher

Professor in the College of Engineering at the University of Illi-

nois, Urbana–Champaign (UIUC). He received the B.S. degree

(magna cum laude) from Princeton University in 1989 in me-

chanical and aerospace engineering. He received the M.S. and

Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering in 1992 and 1994,

respectively, from the University of California, Berkeley, while

on leave from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He joined the

UIUC Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering in

1994 and is also appointed in the Coordinated Science Labora-

tory, the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and

the Institute for Genomic Biology. He currently leads the NSF

Engineering Research Center on Power Optimization for Elec-

tro-Thermal Systems. He was awarded the ASME Dynamic

Systems and Control Division’s Outstanding Young Investigator

Award, the Henry Paynter Award, and the Charles Stark Draper

Award. He was a Fulbright fellow to The Netherlands, where

he held a visiting professorship in vehicle mechatronics at TU

Delft, and he has held other visiting professor positions the Uni-

versity of Colorado at Boulder, Johannes Kepler University, and

ETH Zurich. He is the recipient of the ASME Gustus L. Larson

Memorial Award, and he is a National Research Council fellow

and a fellow of ASME. His research interests are a mix of theory

and implementation with a broad application focus resulting in

over 350 papers in journals and conferences. In addition to re-

search, he has a keen interest in education and has earned

the College of Engineering’s Teaching Excellence Award, the

UIUC Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Educa-

tion, and the UIUC Campus Award for Excellence in Graduate

Student Mentoring. He has been active in the ASME, the IEEE,

and several other societies. Additionally, he has been active on

several boards including the Scientific Advisory Board for the

U.S. Air Force.

Jonathan P. how

Bayu standing next to the coldest cryostat at the Dutch Space Research Institute in Groningen, The Netherlands, with an operating temperature of 50 mK.

FEBRUARY 2017 « IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE 21

METIS is designed to measure basic chemical and physical properties of exoplanets. From a systems engineer-ing perspective, the realization of such an ultrasensitive instrument imposes stringent requirements to all of its sub-systems, including the two-dimension-al chopping mechanism we worked on. This mechatronic system must be oper-ational at cryogenic temperatures, have negligible heat dissipation, and be able to move very fast from one operating point or scanning profile to another. All of these requirements put a lot of constraints on the design space, includ-ing the control systems.

The demonstrator project was suc-cessfully completed in 2014, where we used a combination strategy of hybrid and repetitive control. I am looking forward to seeing its per-formance when the instrument will be commissioned in about ten years from now. As a continuation to this project, we are now working together with the Dutch Space Research Insti-tute and the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute on a high-contrast optics project for future space missions aim-ing at enabling a wideband wave-length measurement of exoplanets in a habitable zone.

The second research project is on systems biology, where we have worked on a new model-order-reduc-tion method applicable for general (bio)-chemical reaction networks. We believe that such tools will become indispensable in handling the com-plexity of future genome-scale kinetic models, in particular, when the use of models becomes crucial for the feed-back loop in future model-based per-sonalized medicine.

The third project is on the devel-opment of advanced process control for ultra-high-vacuum chemical vapor deposition batch reactors in collabora-tion with a multinational company. In contrast to the previous two projects, we must deal with ultra-low pressure in combination with high tempera-ture. In all of these cases, our expertise on nonlinear control has enabled us to explore the unchartered nonlinear ter-

ritories, beyond the comfort zone of linear domain.

The fourth project is on the dy-namic planning and control of con-tainer-terminal operations, which was conducted with one of the Indonesian port authorities. Indonesia is an archi-

pelago country with more than 13,000 islands, and the current government has placed top priority on the optimi-zation of its maritime transportation network. We developed a dynamic planning algorithm that is based on model predictive control, and I am

Bayu Jayawardhana during the Ph.D. defense of his first Ph.D. student, Ruiyue Ouyang, in 2013. From left: Prof. Kirsten Morris (University of Waterloo), Prof. Claudio de Persis (University of Groningen), Prof. Jacquelien Scherpen (University of Groningen), Prof. Harry Trentelmann (hidden behind, University of Groningen), Bayu, Dr. Shuo Zhang (now at Siemens, United Kingdom), Dr. Ruiyue Ouyang (now at ASML, The Netherlands), Prof. Arjan van der Schaft (University of Groningen), Dr. Matin Jafarian (University of Groningen), Prof. Paul van den Bosch (TU Eindhoven), Prof. Sophie Tarbouriech (LAAS, Toulouse), Prof. Ruth Curtain (University of Groningen), and Prof. Beatriz Noheda (University of Groningen).

Bayu standing on top of a saline wastewater-treatment plant in Delfzijl, The Netherlands.

22 IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE » FEBRUARY 2017

very satisfied to learn that our algo-rithm has been tested at an Indone-sian seaport and has improved the quay-crane allocation ratio, which is one of the key performance indicators, by about 5%. We are now investigating the network case and will report our findings hopefully soon.

The fifth project is on distributed formation-motion control of mobile robots together with my colleague, Prof. Ming Cao, and our student, Hec-tor Garcia de Marina. In this project, we worked on an open problem posed by Prof. Shaoshuai Mou (now at Purdue University) and coworkers, where a dis-agreement in the distance parameter in the gradient-based distributed control law of an undirected network leads to the distortion of the whole formation. We have proposed an elegant solution to this problem, which was published in IEEE Transactions on Robotics in 2014. Based on the insights that we have learned from solving this problem, we have proposed a simple modification to the standard gradient-based law that allows us to simul taneously achieve maneuvering and formation of robots, and it is reported in a recent paper in IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

Finally, we are also working on a novel wave-energy converter device, called the Ocean Grazer (http://www .oceangrazer.com). Its novelty lies in its adaptability to the full spectrum of ocean waves and on its large-scale energy-storage capability. It uses a floater-blanket technology, consist-ing of multiple coupled wave-energy converters, each of which is linked to a controllable multipiston pump system, that are able to pump work-ing fluid from the lower basin to the upper basin. Electricity can thus be generated by converting the stored potential energy in the upper basin

via turbines. Due to the large number of distributed sensors and actuators in the full-scale system, there are many challenging control problems, which we are currently investigating within our Ocean Grazer group.

Q. What courses do you teach relat­ing to control? Do you have a favor­ite course? How would you describe your teaching style?

Bayu: I teach a second-year bach-elor’s course on signals and systems, a first-year master’s course on fitting dy-namical models to data, and a graduate course on nonlinear control systems for the Dutch Institute for Systems and Control. I have also liked very much teaching nonlinear control systems, as well as signals and systems. I have always enjoyed the Massachusetts In-stitute of Technology’s open course on electricity and magnetism, which was taught by Prof. Walter Lewin. There-fore, I try to emulate his teaching style in all of my courses.

Q. What are some of the most prom­ising opportunities you see in the control field?

Bayu: I think that the systems and control field will experience another golden age when the concept of Indus-try 4.0 (as popularized in Germany) or of smart industry (as developed in The Netherlands) or of smart manufactur-ing (as it is known in the United States) takes off. I am currently involved in the formulation of the Dutch national road map in Smart Industry, and I see the opportunity that lies ahead with the reshoring trend of the high-tech manufacturing sector into Europe or the United States.

Q. What are some of your interests and activities outside of your profes­sional career?

Bayu: One of my favorite pastime activities is doing origami with my daughter. I would recommend the book Origami Design Secrets: Mathemati-cal Methods for an Ancient Art by Robert J. Lang, if you are interested in origami.

Q. Thank you for your comments.Bayu: You are welcome. It is al-

ways nice to read your column and it is my pleasure to share my thoughts. Thank you.

Profile of Bayu Jayawardhana• Current position: associate professor, University of Groningen.

• Visiting and research positions: Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France.

• Contact information: University of Groningen, Engineering and Technology

Institute Groningen, Nijenborgh 4, Room 5117.0117, 9747AG Groningen, The

Netherlands, b.jayawardhana@rug.nl, http://www.rug.nl/staff/b.jayawardhana.

• IEEE Control Systems Society experience highlights: chair, Technical Com-

mittee on Systems Biology (2015–2016); associate editor, IEEE CSS Confer-

ence Editorial Board; associate editor, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems

Technology (2017–present).

• Notable awards: Senior Member, IEEE (2014); grand prize award, TI-Asia

DSP Solution Challenge (1999).